January 1st 2009
The Most Ridiculous Story Of 2009: Greenwald On Human Rights
I
t seems like only yesterday I was picking the most ridiculous story of 2008, and already there’s a nominee for the 2009 award, which won’t be awarded for another 364 days. The piece certainly meets all the rigorous entry requirements: It is written by a serious sock puppet writer about a serious subject in all seriousness, yet it goes far, far beyond the sublime and settles heavily into the imbecilic.
In Another Brutal Year for Liberty, Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald finds 2008 to have been a year “befitting an administration that has spent eight years obliterating America’s core political values.” My Inside-the-Beltway mother pulled this on me a while back saying it would take years for America to recover from the damage to its freedoms caused by Bush. I asked her to describe one freedom she had lost; there was no answer - so maybe the reason why it’ll take so long to recover the freedoms is that we’ll have to figure out which ones we lost first … and that could take a while.
What makes the Greenwald piece particularly fun, if no less ridiculous, is that it give us the opportunity to watch a premier Bush-hater agonize over his beloved Dems siding with Bush:
Unlike the early years of the administration, when liberty-abridging policies were conceived of in secret and unilaterally implemented by the executive branch, many of the erosions of 2008 were the dirty work of the U.S. Congress, fueled by the passive fear or active complicity of the Democratic Party that controlled it.
The Patriot Act, which Greenwald hates, was of course passed by Congress with Dem support, not by the executive branch, but who cares about mere trivialities when you’re fired up for a rant? And speaking of a rant, I really can’t go any further without ranting a bit about this illustration, which was selected to accompany the piece. My rant: Couldn’t they have worked a little harder to incorporate a swastika into it?
Greenwald focuses his angst first on FISA and telecom company immunity from prosecution for assisting in the war on terror - something he condemns wholly but most people see as a necessary tactic in the war on terror that has virtually no impact on US citizens:
The most intensely fought civil liberties battle of 2008 — the one waged over FISA and telecom immunity — ended the way most similar battles of the last eight years have: with total defeat for civil libertarians. Even before Democrats were handed control of Congress at the beginning of 2007, the Bush administration had been demanding legislation to legalize its illegal warrantless NSA eavesdropping program and to retroactively immunize the telecom industry for its participation in those programs. Yet even with Bill Frist and Denny Hastert in control of the Congress, the administration couldn’t get its way.
Not even the most cynical political observer would have believed that it was the ascension of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that would be the necessary catalyst for satisfying Bush’s most audacious demands, concerning his most brazenly illegal actions. If anything, hopes were high that Democratic control of Congress would entail a legislative halt to warrantless eavesdropping or, at the very least, some meaningful investigation and disclosure — what we once charmingly called “oversight” — regarding what Bush’s domestic spying had really entailed. After all, the NSA program was the purified embodiment of the most radical attributes of a radical regime — pure lawlessness, absolute secrecy, a Stasi-like fixation on domestic surveillance. It was widely assumed, even among embittered cynics, that the new Democratic leadership in Congress would not use their newfound control to protect and endorse these abuses.
Let’s focus a moment on “his most brazenly illegal actions,” shall we? I thought that was the war in Iraq - or possibly arranging for the airliners to be flown into the WTC so Halliburton could raise its dividend - and I’m shocked to learn that Greenwald gives his “most brazenly illegal” title to the mere NSA program. Seems like a waste of any “most” designation, doesn’t it? It’s not exactly like the NSA electronic surveillance program led to concentration camps or the appointment of Sarah Palin as president for life.
As for “oversight,” the Congressional leadership - including Pelosi and Reid - did have oversight of the program, were fully briefed and saw its value in accomplishing their primary duty of protecting America. That Greenwald is still whipping this horse is ridiculous, but whip it he does:
Yet in July 2008, there stood Pelosi and Reid, leading their caucuses as they stamped their imprimatur of approval on Bush’s spying programs. The so-called FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed with virtually unanimous GOP and substantial Democratic support, including the entire top level of the House Democratic leadership. It legalized vast new categories of warrantless eavesdropping and endowed telecoms with full immunity for prior surveillance lawbreaking. Most important, it ensured a permanent and harmless end to what appeared to be the devastating scandal that exploded in 2005 when the New York Times revealed to the country that the Bush administration was spying on Americans illegally, without warrants of any kind.
Nowhere in the column does Greenwald detail a single civil liberty that was even lightly tweaked by the NSA program or its 2008 extension; it must just be accepted on its face that the law is bad because (1) it’s from the Bush administration and (2) it targets poor, suffering terrorists. He does take time, however, to point out that Obama violated his pledge (the shock of it!) to filibuster any bill containing immunity for the telcomms. How cute that he still holds out hope that Obama is not just another politician.
Greenwald next addresses America’s “torture crisis,” and no, he’s not concerned that liberal lunacy is critically curtailing our ability to exact useful information from people who want to destroy our nation. No, he’s talking about the effort in February to amend the Defense Authorization Act to require all government agencies, including the CIA, to comply with the interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual.
“The most immediate effect of such a law would have been to impose an absolute ban on the use of waterboarding, along with any other coercive tactics - torture techniques - which the Manual does not explicitly authorize,” Greenwalt wrote. But Congress - a Dem Congress - failed to override Bush’s veto of the amendment.
The path taken was slightly different, but the outcome was the same: total failure in reining in Bush’s abuses. Indeed, by the end of 2008, civil libertarians could point to many defeats suffered in the Democratic-controlled Congress, but not a single victory.
Greenwald then gets around to habeas corpus restrictions on detained terrorists, which he calls “one of the worst constitutional assaults of the Bush era.” He doesn’t mention that it was also, then, one of the worst constitutional assaults of the Lincoln era and that America got along just fine, correcting itself after the restrictions did what they needed to do during the Civil War. Never mind history; Greenwald’s got a rant to deliver here.
He of course loved the Boumediene case, which was detainees getting habeas corpus, and was just happy as a clam to see terrorists freed from Gitmo and returned to Bosnia and other fronts in the Islamist war against civilization. Any setback in the war against jihad is a victory for human rights in Greenwald’s twisted perception - even if the released terrorists were to subsequently tweak a human right or two themselves - say by blowing up a school filled with children.
Fortunately for us, unfortunately for leftist goons, Greenwald’s joy over Boumediene was short-lived:
One of the most potentially damaging judicial developments of the year was a horrendous ruling issued in July by the conservative Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. The al-Marri court actually upheld the president’s claimed authority to detain legal residents and even U.S. citizens in a military prison as “enemy combatants,” rather than charge them in a civilian court with a crime.
Al-Marri is up for SCOTUS review so Greenwald is clinging to hope that terrorist combatants will be able to have the same rights that Bushitler wants to take away from all of us.
Perhaps the most ridiculous thing of all about Greenwald’s column is that after bashing on the Dems and The Mighty Obama himself he still holds out hope that Obama is not just another politician:
The one silver lining is that the last 12 months have been brightly clarifying: It is clearer than ever what the Obama administration can and must do in order to arrest and reverse the decade-long war on the Constitution waged by our own government.
Has it ever occurred to you, as it has to me, that if something as powerful and sinister as the Bush/Cheney/Rove cabal cannot succeed in turning America into a concentration camp in eight long years, even with al-Qaeda giving them all sorts of extra boost, then either (1) America must have a pretty darn good system in place, or (2) they really weren’t trying very hard.
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Posted in FISA, Human Rights, NSA, Ridiculous | 2 Comments » | 
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June 17th, 2009 at 5:52 am
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January 2nd, 2009 at 10:04 am
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I’ve found it fascinating that people will stand up and declare the US a police state and the Bush administration Nazis, with apparently complete confidence that they will wake up in their own beds the next morning.